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Thursday 16 October 2008

Shatner's kidney

Snide remarks about William Shatner in a review of his autobiography hardly seem the most important issue of our time. But I want to explain why it matters, and why unless Captain Kirk's books are given fair treatment, the battle to save western civilisation will be lost.

Yes, William Shatner he has always come across as - to be polite - somewhat eccentric and as an actor he has never really challenged Lord Olivier's legacy. But he is, to use an over used word, a legend. As Captain Kirk, he was the lead in possibly the most memorable TV series ever, and is certainly one of the great cultural icons of our time. We are surely entitled to a review of his book which is not wilfully slanted and which is based on accuracy rather than distortion.

So one would have hoped for something more insightful and less determined to put the boot in than this hatchet job from Tom Shone in the Sunday Times. Take this example:

Shatner doesn't let the charge of self-absorption delay him long; there's his appearance on the World Wide Wrestling channel to be getting on with, or the time he sold his kidney stone on eBay... The reader is left to decide whether this is all a sign of incipient postmodernism (the first actor to display knowledge of his own cheesiness) or just an ego so hungry that no crumb is too small to be worth chasing under the table.

Sounds horrific. But Shone doesn't give even a smidgen of the full story: 

As some of you might have heard by now, GoldenPalace.com has bought a kidney stone of mine for $75,000. I was delighted to be able to raise that kind of money for Habitat for Humanity along with contributions from the cast of Boston Legal who gave a gift on behalf of the whole Boston Legal company to Habitat.

So rather than self-absorption, it was an act of charity. I wonder when Tom Shone last raised such a sum for charity. Instead of using it a further tool with which to sneer at Shatner, of Shone was doing a proper job he would use it to heap praise on the man.

As I say, it's hardly the most pressing issue of our time that a reviewer has done a hatchet job on William Shatner. But it's this sort of wilfully misleading journalism which, on a bigger scale, leads to warped reporting of the Middle East and warps perceptions of what is going in the war on terror. If Israel, for instance, is attacked for its security cordons without any mention of the threats from which it is tryting to protect its citizens, if any attack on Islamism is treated as an attack on Muslims, and if the liberation of a country from a brutal dictator is described as a war crime, then we are all finished.

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